Peter Dutton and supporters need to own the mess they’ve created for Liberal party

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announces he’ll hold a party room meeting at noon tomorrow should Peter Dutton produce enough signatures. Photo: Kym Smith

The farce that today has become for the Liberal Party, the government and the country is entirely the fault of the Dutton forces and the reactionaries who brought the leadership to a head.

Malcolm Turnbull has every right to demand a list of signatures demanding a party room spill. Why? Because two spills in one week is virtually unprecedented. It’s show and tell time. Presumably the list will soon follow, but it’s a reasonable request.

So is knowing if Peter Dutton is even eligible to sit in the parliament. The Solicitor General’s advice will help clarify how likely that is. Waiting for such advice is cheeky but fair.

While the Dutton forces are in a rush to dethrone Turnbull, that’s their problem.

If Scott Morrison defeats Dutton in a showdown that would be a shame, simply because the Dutton forces need to own the outcome of the mess they have created — the election outcome that will follow this mess.

Australian PM Turnbull says his opponents have conducted an “internal insurgency”, and there is “a very deliberate effort to pull the Liberal Party further to the right” #auspol pic.twitter.com/Hb2ta5UIWK

— Primrose Riordan (@primroseriordan) August 23, 2018

Even the ratings agencies are now saying the AAA credit rating may go because of the shambles — the one strength Liberals have always enjoyed: economic management.

If Dutton becomes PM and implements a reactionary agenda, we will finally find out if Australia still has a political centre. I suspect it does, certainly with compulsory voting.

Australians likely can’t wait for their chance to cast judgment on this conservative reactionary policy push. Never forget, the last four Newspolls before this week had Turnbull’s government trailing by a slender 51-49 per cent. John Howard rarely enjoyed such proximity to his Labor opponents at this point in the electoral cycle.

Peter van Onselen is a professor at The University of Western Australia and Griffith University